The BBC pegs Errol Morris’ Stardard Operating Procedure film to the notorious 4 year anniversary of the photos seen round the world, the Abu Ghraib torture pictures. The BBC, conservative by U.K. standards, pulls no punches in applying the word torture to the images unlike the American press which is shamelessly mired in admistration euphemisms like enhanced interrogation.
Filed under: Department of Justice, Iraq, Media, News Headlines, Politics, War, War Crimes, news, torture | Tagged: Abu Ghraib, Addington, bbc, Bush, Cheney, Errol Morris, Morris, Movie, Prisoners, rice, Rumsfeld, Soldiers, Standard Operating Procedure, Yoo
On Nguyen Ngoc Loan and his famous photograph, Eddie Adams wrote in Time :
The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.
What the photograph didn’t say was, ‘What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?’
Adams later apologized in person to General Nguyen and his family for the irreparable damage it did to Loan’s honor while he was alive. When Nguyen died, Adams praised him as a “hero” of a “just cause”.
I like what Errol Morris said about mininterpreting still photographs. We look at one instance and draw our own conclusions about the rest of the story. It’s easy to look at the horror of war and forget that, sometimes, war is necessary. I think anyone that doesn’t decry torture is a flawed person, but I also believe that there are many issues that are vastly more important.
Respectfully, I’m going to disagree with keenedge somewhat. I stopped thinking war is ever necessary a long time ago; I would say, given that we are all flawed, as human beings, war is inevitable. Never necessary.
There is an excellent piece today over at Common Dreams entitled History Will Not Absolve Us which I think beautifully states why this issue is so very important to the soul of this nation.
The final paragraphs from Common Dreams touch on the import of being a nation that tortures: